http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/02/Apr/marriage. html Marriage in Heaven eyesbright@aol.comedienne (Randy Russell) AOL http://www.aol.com (chuckle, heard it)
On their way to get married, a young couple are involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven.
While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out," and he leaves.
The couple sat and waited for an answer. . . . for a couple of months. While they waited, they discussed that IF they were allowed to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married, what with the eternal aspect of it all.
"What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are we stuck together FOREVER?"
After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you CAN get married in Heaven."
"Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?"
St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slams his clipboard to the ground.
"What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple.
"OH, COME ON!!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?"
The thing to do, and I'm really surprised that this isn't more popular, is to get one of those Sony rotisserie style jukeboxes that holds 200 or 300 DVDs. I just got one to hold all my CDs (well, 400 of them anyway) mainly to get some clutter and plastic out of my life, and reclaim some bookshelf space.
Yeah, it costs a few bucks more than the single tray player but it doesn't cost nearly as much as replacing your DVDs because they all got scratched. I have replaced enough CDs over the years (I was an early adopter, I started in 1986, which wasn't all that early) that I wish they'd had a 400-CD jukebox years ago. Fortunately they have 'em for DVD, a pretty easy technology transfer I guess. Do yourself a favor and get one.
Actually, I think the biggest thing that Beta had going for it was that you could scan the tape while fast-forwarding. On VHS, you had to stop, wait for the moving parts to stop whirring, and then press play to see where you were on a tape.
Eventually the VHS people figured out how to do it, but for the first ten years or so you had to get out of fast forward mode in order to get a picture on the screen. Beta could do that from the get-go, and it made working with the tape, a lot faster and easier.
I'm sure someone who is really into video will take up the crusade of why beta is sooo much better than VHS, but eventually VHS more or less caught up, and the six hour tape thing was a really big deal, one in which Beta never could compete. Beta, while technologically superior, was cursed by poor political decisions on the part of Sony, and the tapes were too short anyway.
VHS was to Beta what Microsoft was to IBM back in the 80s -- the open architecture alternative. (Sorry, I had to throw that analogy in just to be cantankerous.)
Let's face it, DVD is a million times better than either VHS or Beta. And if you still need an old beta player, check your local thrift shops. There's more of them out there than you might think.
The reason we have poor eyesight is because of rampant literacy. Kids are sitting on the floor with books inches away from their face, rather than out wokring in a cotton field or something. Their eyes atrophy. They should probably be playing more sports. My eyesight is shot and what do I do? Stare at a computer screen for 12+ hours a day.
The funny thing about the retirement age is that it is totally arbitrary. Many people are completely healthy and able to still work past 62 or 65 or whatever, while others are really falling apart by then.
I think it did until about 1997. then Congress decided that it was piracy if you copied copywritten material, even if no economic harm was done. In other words, the xxAA doesn't have to show that they were damaged by filesharing to come after you. The simple fact that you violated their copyright is reason enough. It used to be you had to show economic harm to come after someone for copying stuff, now you don't.
(Oh, and it's a criminal matter now too, not a civil one, which means that instead of xxAA having to spend their own money on enforcement, they get to spend our money (taxes) and the FBI does it. I don't know if that changed in 1997 as part of the same congressional act.)
It's surprising how ahead of the curve Congress and the xxAA was on that one. Who was even on the Internet in 1997?
YOu don't have to reboot windows after every patch either. I just installed 28 patches on a new box. After it was done I had to do one reboot.
All in all, if you do a clean install of 2000 here's how it goes:
Pop in CD, choose your stuff like disk partitioning, reboot. Setup copies some stuff, reboots again GUI Setup asks for the product key, and basic setup stuff (date time, network), and reboots After that reboot the computer is ready to use. However you will probably want to apply SP2, which will take a reboot. After that there are about 35 things in Windows Update you'll want, but you can roll about 30 of them into one d/l and reboot when it's done A few updates must be installed separately, like SP2SRP1 and IE5.x SP2.
Altogether, it takes about an hour and a half and it requires like nine reboots (I didn't count them all).
Most things, though, aside from new HW drivers, don't need a reboot. Like installing office, that doesn't require a reboot.
What's the big deal about rebooting anyway? Yeah, its a pain to set up computers manually, that's why they invented RIS and all that stuff. RIS notwithstanding, computers actually reboot in like under a minute these days. It's the copyingn files and setting up plug and play devices which takes like an hour in Win 2000 setup.
I can't believe, though, that the reviewer is comparing the redhat install to the use of the Product Recovery CD. That's like comparing the time to drive to the gas station and fill the tank with unleaded with the time for the tow truck to come and tow you to the nearest gas station and fill it up.
I love analogies, they're like metaphors only less so.
Pinbot was the table that taught me how to play pinball. It had great sound effects, wasn't too complicated, but still lots of fun.
The death of pinball has been in the works for decades. When I was a kid, down at the 7-11 they always had a table and two video games. (Pinballs included Centaur, Talking Eight-Ball Deluxe, but I was too small to play pinball then. Instead I played the vids; they rotated through Donkey Kong, Centipede, Mad Planets, and my favorite, Defender. I think they had Mach III for a while too. But I digress)
I'd say the problems with pinball are multi-fold: First of all, pinball requires a lot more maintenane and upkeep. Try playing on a table that leans to one side and it sucks. Duck Hunt EXXTREME or whatever isn't so sensitive.
Second of all, pinball has the moving parts problem. Little solenoids, electromagnets, and actual little lamps are necessary components of the game. Those things break. (Kinda like the number one and two failures in computers are the power supply and hard drive; they're the things that move.)
Third of all, pinball doesn't "improve" with better graphics. Like when Virtua Fighter came out, you could look at the graphics and really be impressed. Pinball is a little more subtle than that. Noone is going to be impressed with the "Video mode" where you have to jump over the Daleks or whatever. Surely there have been improvements in Pinball as technology has advanced, but most of them are gimmmicky, like Magna-Save and stuff like that. The game is still ultimately about keeping the ball from draining (and getting the multiball, and rescuing Timmy from the electric fence, and then getting the SYSTEM FAILURE six-ball multiball on Jurassic Park, man that rocked.)
Pinball is a harsh mistress, too. You might find a familiar table out in the wild and who knows how sensitive the tilt will be? Maybe one of the sensors is broken and you can never advance the bonus X. People who aren't familiar with the game won't even know it's broken.
The great thing about pinball, though, is that you really get physically involved with the game. When you nudge the table it makes a difference. In a way it's kinda like dancing, and you can work with the table or work against it. When you really have your stuff going, and you're catching the ball on the flipper as it speeds down the playfield, then punching it up the left ramp, it is a beautiful thing. When your first ball drains before you even get a flip on it, it's not so great. Video games can't compare to the level of personal intimacy you get with pinball, but they excel in some other ares, like either they work or not, the learning curve isn't so steep, they probably cost less and they take up less space.
I truly hope to see pinball machines out and about twenty years from now, but I've looked at scraping together the cash to buy one just in case. I hope that arcades can survive, but if all they have are two-guys-fighting or eXXXtreme simulation games, I'm going to spend my money on computer games instead.
Yes, drugs have to be tested. Who pays for those tests? It's the same companies that are making the drugs. And look how many new drugs have come on the market in the past five years. That's because, under pressure from pharmaceutical industries, the standards have been relaxed a bit; testing needn't last as long. Then there was that big recall of Claritin, remember that? And just recently they've had to stop a study on giving estrogen to menopausal women because too many were developing heart problems, and it was unsafe to continue the study. That didn't stop "educated" women and doctors from implementing the treatment. Only problem was the "education" was actually marketing propaganda. In that vein, you say the US farmers use GMO seeds because they're educated. I would argue that any "education" coming from Monsanto is just an effort to boost sales.
Are you aware that crops can be grown *without* pesticides? Regular, non-GMO crops have been sustaining mankind without pesticides for thousands of years. Pesticide use only became widespread in the 20th century. Maybe that was a mistake? DDT anyone? Silent Spring??
Now we've learned that insects will adapt to the pesticides, via mutation, etc. So the end result is that we add a bunch of poison to the soil and the food, but it doesn't really stop the bugs. They adapt soon enough. It's kinda like the problem we have with bacteria-resistant penicillin -- after 70 years they're starting to figure it out. Look at that can of Raid under the sink, it says something like "Formula 2001/Change 7." Kinda scary.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to be locked into a cycle of constantly having to re-engineer the crops or re-formulate the pesticides to stay one step ahead of nature, which is doing the same thing to the bugs. It kinda reminds me of Microsoft's new software licensing model.
I would love to show you empirical data regarding GMO food one way or another, but there isn't any. I can't prove that non-ionizing radio emissions are harmful or safe either, because in today's world, where are you going to find a control group? There was a study in England a few years back that showed that altered DNA is not broken down and destroyed right after ingestion in the stomach, but that's the only study that I've ever heard of.
Finally, it doesn't matter if reactionary Luddites or The Illuminati are responsible for Europe's anti-GMO stance. It is a political reality in which Zimbabweean agriculture must exist. They can't ignore it just because you don't agree with it!!
Maybe you should read my other post here; it takes a parallel trajectory down a different track altogether.
All the fuss is because if the trojan corn somehow gets planted and grows, then that represents unlicensed used of the product and Zimbabwe's corn can't be sold because the crop was "stolen" from Monsanto or Ortho or whoever's GM seeds it came from.
Even if the corn manufacturer didn't come after them for theft, Zimbabwe still wouldn't be able to sell ANY of their corn to countries that don't accept GMO food becuase they're very picky about tiny amounts of contamination. It's kinda like to be "organic" fruit or the fields have to have been free of pesticides for thee years -- only then do they say it's organic. Before that it's transitional.
Now, I have strong feelings about GMO foods. It's one thing to cross this rose with this rose and make a new rose. It's something else when you splice a gene from a salmon into a strawberry. Maybe it's no different from a functional biology perspective but to me, selective breeding is very different than molecular level manipulation of DNA.
The other thing is: how do we know this stuff is safe? Who tests it? What is so wrong with non-GMO food that it's reached the end of its useful lifespan and needs to be "overclocked" to provide any value?
And this whole concept of the "terminator" seed, one that only grows once, and the seed it produces is sterile. I don't think I'm being alarmist whey I say I'm very concerned about those kinds of seeds being introduced in the wild. Who is to say it wouldn't cross-breed with "normal" plants and keep them from reproducing? Don't many of the variations in life around us stem from mutations or genetic mishaps of one form or another?
If you want me to believe that GMO food is just fine, then I need to see empirical data. Show me leukemia rates for children who eat "normal" crops and ones who eat GMO. No such studies exist, to my knowledge. I'm not going to just take the word of the salesman that the product is safe, and the USDA shouldn't either.
Dude, the serial numbers. Creepy. WHen I was a kid, there was this old couple up the street and I don't exaclty know why, but one day I was in their house and I saw the digits on her forearm. It was pretty amazing, even as a kid I sorta knew what that meant. It is a memory that has stuck with me ever since.
Poor EU. I get the feeling that they are trying so hard to copy America's economic model for success that they might just lose sight of what it is that makes Europe a good place to live in the first place.
"Look, America has a strong currency, we need one too, or we can't be competitive"
"Snakeoil" is one of the default settings in Openssl when you make certificates for yourself. They tell you to change it to whatever town you're in...if you read the directions...
So... we don't read the articles, and Slashdot admins don't read the directions.
According to the article, so far there's only a 4.7% increase between the 4x and 8x cards.
That article would have been about a million times more useful if they had bothered to show performance of an AGP 2x system. From what I can see, there is no compelling performance increase (5% better doesn't compel me to buy a new mobo) with this new standard.
Anyone have an idea as to how AGP 4x compared to 2x when it first came out, and how it stacks up now that the technology is mature?
Actually I just got a new AGP4x video card, and I've been thinking about dropping it in my old Dell workstation with 2x AGP to see how it does, but of course that computer has a PII-350 and my new one has an Athlon XP 1600+ so it wouldn't really be too useful a comparison...
Re:Can't get AGP 4x stable?
on
AGP4X vs. AGP8X
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yeah, those Radeon drivers are weird, huh? I just got my 8500 and man, those betas from guru3d or whatever will screw with your system. I got the BSoD once, but several time the system actually just froze, which is pretty impressive, and shows how Microsoft has incoroporated some of Linux's features into their product line
Here's how the network administrator gets into the zone:
I visit windowsupdate and download all the latest security patches, and then, I read the mega-combined EULA which is actually twenty separate EULAs in one, in that tiny text box that only shows like 200 words at a time.
My boss thought I was on drugs when I started doing that. Although she might be right; windowsupdate is kind of like an addiction. I keep going back for more, just checking to see if there's any new "good stuff" there.
The fact that he showed it to a newspaper reporter indicates there was *no* goodwill involved.
So, we should do it the Microsoft way? Tell the company about a flaw in their system and let them spend months to fix it, leaving countless unaware individuals completely vulnerable while the "proper authorities" formulate a cost-benefit analysis and figure out where the bug fix lives on the Gantt chart?
Why do you think we *have* news?? You would prefer to get all your news from press releases and government propaganda, it seems.
First of all, the county's IT department was negligent, possibly to the point of criminality, in providing WiFi access to the LAN without any security measures. Would Puffer be looking at five years of jail time if he plugged his laptop into a jack in the hall and found he had LAN access? Maybe. But isn't the County office, by definition, public property? He wasn't tresspassing.
It's like if the government was sending secret information unencrypted on 95.5 FM. You tuned in, told a govt agent and a reporter about it, and now you're the one who did something wrong? This makes sense to anyone here?
The person who really made out in this gig is the "Security Consultant" who charged $5,000 to "solve" this problem. Setting up a VPN for your WiFi clients takes what, about 20 minutes? But clearly the County was so alarmed about the Terrorist Hackers out there that they decided they needed a big expensive solutions. These are serious problems, you know, and they will probably get some of that Anti-Terrorism money from the Feds to pay for Hardening their System against FutureTerrorist Attacks.
By the way, I deal with confidential medical data as part of my job. There's this law called HIPAA. If I were to set up an open WiFi access point on my LAN, *I* could be jailed and fined up to $25,000. *NOT* the guy who is nice enough to tell us (but kind of a dick for telling the local paper.)
What's next? Are we gonna go after Richard Feynman for pointing out that frozen O-Rings make the Shuttle blow up? Mabye I should get hauled off for mentioning that you can punch through the hull of a pressurized aircraft while it's in flight with a big enough screwdriver!
Don't worry about me, though. When I get hauled off into the black Fed car, I'll just yell "Hack the Planet" to the kids on the street and next thing you know, the Slashdot Activist Justice League will rally to my defense!
Let's see, on the front page we have two stories. One is entitled "MPAA Requests Immunity to Commit Cyber-Crimes" and it's all about those evil Hollywood companies and how they're going to DoS you because you have a few MP3s on your box.
Then, there's this story about how kewl all this new Anime is and how awesome it will be if Hollywood can bring more Anime to American consumers.
You all are a bunch of f@#$ing morons. You can't even tell when your culture is being co-opted by THE SAME PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO SCREW YOU. You're even freaking happy about it, like it will become BETTER when it goes mainstream? What? You think this world will be a better place if Hollywood owns the rights to all your precious kewl anime!?
I simply can't believe the rampant, ignorant hypocrisy of this forum. It's like it's nothing but a bunch of 1337 5cr1p7 k1dd135 talking shit about "anarchy" and "f@#$ the man" while they're pumping every last dollar into the latest shiny entertainment trinket the local Best Buy has to offer.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but Windows File Protection can be overriden in the registry, and the whole concept is to prevent people, by which I mean users, from trying to see the Secret Message from Bill Gates that only shows up if you del *.dll in C:\Windows.
Why is notepad a protected file? Hell, why is calc.exe a protected file? That's what I'd like to know.
Slashdot Mirror
RHAT vs MSFT [yahoo.com]
Nice sig, but I believe this is the stock price comparison you are looking for.
It can't be dry and wit at the same time, retard.
You know what would be cool? If I could go out and get Space Junk by Devo on Napster right now.
God, I miss the 90s.
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/02/Apr/marriage. html
Marriage in Heaven
eyesbright@aol.comedienne (Randy Russell)
AOL http://www.aol.com
(chuckle, heard it)
On their way to get married, a young couple are involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven.
While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out," and he leaves.
The couple sat and waited for an answer. . . . for a couple of months. While they waited, they discussed that IF they were allowed to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married, what with the eternal aspect of it all.
"What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are we stuck together FOREVER?"
After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you CAN get married in Heaven."
"Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?"
St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slams his clipboard to the ground.
"What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple.
"OH, COME ON!!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?"
The thing to do, and I'm really surprised that this isn't more popular, is to get one of those Sony rotisserie style jukeboxes that holds 200 or 300 DVDs. I just got one to hold all my CDs (well, 400 of them anyway) mainly to get some clutter and plastic out of my life, and reclaim some bookshelf space.
Yeah, it costs a few bucks more than the single tray player but it doesn't cost nearly as much as replacing your DVDs because they all got scratched. I have replaced enough CDs over the years (I was an early adopter, I started in 1986, which wasn't all that early) that I wish they'd had a 400-CD jukebox years ago. Fortunately they have 'em for DVD, a pretty easy technology transfer I guess. Do yourself a favor and get one.
Actually, I think the biggest thing that Beta had going for it was that you could scan the tape while fast-forwarding. On VHS, you had to stop, wait for the moving parts to stop whirring, and then press play to see where you were on a tape.
Eventually the VHS people figured out how to do it, but for the first ten years or so you had to get out of fast forward mode in order to get a picture on the screen. Beta could do that from the get-go, and it made working with the tape, a lot faster and easier.
I'm sure someone who is really into video will take up the crusade of why beta is sooo much better than VHS, but eventually VHS more or less caught up, and the six hour tape thing was a really big deal, one in which Beta never could compete. Beta, while technologically superior, was cursed by poor political decisions on the part of Sony, and the tapes were too short anyway.
VHS was to Beta what Microsoft was to IBM back in the 80s -- the open architecture alternative. (Sorry, I had to throw that analogy in just to be cantankerous.)
Let's face it, DVD is a million times better than either VHS or Beta. And if you still need an old beta player, check your local thrift shops. There's more of them out there than you might think.
The reason we have poor eyesight is because of rampant literacy. Kids are sitting on the floor with books inches away from their face, rather than out wokring in a cotton field or something. Their eyes atrophy. They should probably be playing more sports. My eyesight is shot and what do I do? Stare at a computer screen for 12+ hours a day.
The funny thing about the retirement age is that it is totally arbitrary. Many people are completely healthy and able to still work past 62 or 65 or whatever, while others are really falling apart by then.
I think it did until about 1997. then Congress decided that it was piracy if you copied copywritten material, even if no economic harm was done. In other words, the xxAA doesn't have to show that they were damaged by filesharing to come after you. The simple fact that you violated their copyright is reason enough. It used to be you had to show economic harm to come after someone for copying stuff, now you don't.
(Oh, and it's a criminal matter now too, not a civil one, which means that instead of xxAA having to spend their own money on enforcement, they get to spend our money (taxes) and the FBI does it. I don't know if that changed in 1997 as part of the same congressional act.)
It's surprising how ahead of the curve Congress and the xxAA was on that one. Who was even on the Internet in 1997?
The xxAA is not as dumb as we like to think
YOu don't have to reboot windows after every patch either. I just installed 28 patches on a new box. After it was done I had to do one reboot.
All in all, if you do a clean install of 2000 here's how it goes:
Pop in CD, choose your stuff like disk partitioning, reboot.
Setup copies some stuff, reboots again
GUI Setup asks for the product key, and basic setup stuff (date time, network), and reboots
After that reboot the computer is ready to use. However you will probably want to apply SP2, which will take a reboot.
After that there are about 35 things in Windows Update you'll want, but you can roll about 30 of them into one d/l and reboot when it's done
A few updates must be installed separately, like SP2SRP1 and IE5.x SP2.
Altogether, it takes about an hour and a half and it requires like nine reboots (I didn't count them all).
Most things, though, aside from new HW drivers, don't need a reboot. Like installing office, that doesn't require a reboot.
What's the big deal about rebooting anyway? Yeah, its a pain to set up computers manually, that's why they invented RIS and all that stuff. RIS notwithstanding, computers actually reboot in like under a minute these days. It's the copyingn files and setting up plug and play devices which takes like an hour in Win 2000 setup.
I can't believe, though, that the reviewer is comparing the redhat install to the use of the Product Recovery CD. That's like comparing the time to drive to the gas station and fill the tank with unleaded with the time for the tow truck to come and tow you to the nearest gas station and fill it up.
I love analogies, they're like metaphors only less so.
To paraphrase the AC:
The only people who are worried about these types of programs are the ones with something to hide
The fact that an AC said this deserves either a +1 Ironic or -1 Ignorant. Unfortunately you didn't include any sarcasm tags to help us decide.
I think he was thinking of CP/M.
Oh yeah, NWG. I have all his albums. He's the Playa with the Hardware Abstraction Layer
PINBOT...CIRCUITS ACTIVATED
Pinbot was the table that taught me how to play pinball. It had great sound effects, wasn't too complicated, but still lots of fun.
The death of pinball has been in the works for decades. When I was a kid, down at the 7-11 they always had a table and two video games. (Pinballs included Centaur, Talking Eight-Ball Deluxe, but I was too small to play pinball then. Instead I played the vids; they rotated through Donkey Kong, Centipede, Mad Planets, and my favorite, Defender. I think they had Mach III for a while too. But I digress)
I'd say the problems with pinball are multi-fold: First of all, pinball requires a lot more maintenane and upkeep. Try playing on a table that leans to one side and it sucks. Duck Hunt EXXTREME or whatever isn't so sensitive.
Second of all, pinball has the moving parts problem. Little solenoids, electromagnets, and actual little lamps are necessary components of the game. Those things break. (Kinda like the number one and two failures in computers are the power supply and hard drive; they're the things that move.)
Third of all, pinball doesn't "improve" with better graphics. Like when Virtua Fighter came out, you could look at the graphics and really be impressed. Pinball is a little more subtle than that. Noone is going to be impressed with the "Video mode" where you have to jump over the Daleks or whatever. Surely there have been improvements in Pinball as technology has advanced, but most of them are gimmmicky, like Magna-Save and stuff like that. The game is still ultimately about keeping the ball from draining (and getting the multiball, and rescuing Timmy from the electric fence, and then getting the SYSTEM FAILURE six-ball multiball on Jurassic Park, man that rocked.)
Pinball is a harsh mistress, too. You might find a familiar table out in the wild and who knows how sensitive the tilt will be? Maybe one of the sensors is broken and you can never advance the bonus X. People who aren't familiar with the game won't even know it's broken.
The great thing about pinball, though, is that you really get physically involved with the game. When you nudge the table it makes a difference. In a way it's kinda like dancing, and you can work with the table or work against it. When you really have your stuff going, and you're catching the ball on the flipper as it speeds down the playfield, then punching it up the left ramp, it is a beautiful thing. When your first ball drains before you even get a flip on it, it's not so great. Video games can't compare to the level of personal intimacy you get with pinball, but they excel in some other ares, like either they work or not, the learning curve isn't so steep, they probably cost less and they take up less space.
I truly hope to see pinball machines out and about twenty years from now, but I've looked at scraping together the cash to buy one just in case. I hope that arcades can survive, but if all they have are two-guys-fighting or eXXXtreme simulation games, I'm going to spend my money on computer games instead.
Yes, drugs have to be tested. Who pays for those tests? It's the same companies that are making the drugs. And look how many new drugs have come on the market in the past five years. That's because, under pressure from pharmaceutical industries, the standards have been relaxed a bit; testing needn't last as long. Then there was that big recall of Claritin, remember that? And just recently they've had to stop a study on giving estrogen to menopausal women because too many were developing heart problems, and it was unsafe to continue the study. That didn't stop "educated" women and doctors from implementing the treatment. Only problem was the "education" was actually marketing propaganda. In that vein, you say the US farmers use GMO seeds because they're educated. I would argue that any "education" coming from Monsanto is just an effort to boost sales.
Are you aware that crops can be grown *without* pesticides? Regular, non-GMO crops have been sustaining mankind without pesticides for thousands of years. Pesticide use only became widespread in the 20th century. Maybe that was a mistake? DDT anyone? Silent Spring??
Now we've learned that insects will adapt to the pesticides, via mutation, etc. So the end result is that we add a bunch of poison to the soil and the food, but it doesn't really stop the bugs. They adapt soon enough. It's kinda like the problem we have with bacteria-resistant penicillin -- after 70 years they're starting to figure it out. Look at that can of Raid under the sink, it says something like "Formula 2001/Change 7." Kinda scary.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to be locked into a cycle of constantly having to re-engineer the crops or re-formulate the pesticides to stay one step ahead of nature, which is doing the same thing to the bugs. It kinda reminds me of Microsoft's new software licensing model.
I would love to show you empirical data regarding GMO food one way or another, but there isn't any. I can't prove that non-ionizing radio emissions are harmful or safe either, because in today's world, where are you going to find a control group? There was a study in England a few years back that showed that altered DNA is not broken down and destroyed right after ingestion in the stomach, but that's the only study that I've ever heard of.
Finally, it doesn't matter if reactionary Luddites or The Illuminati are responsible for Europe's anti-GMO stance. It is a political reality in which Zimbabweean agriculture must exist. They can't ignore it just because you don't agree with it!!
Maybe you should read my other post here; it takes a parallel trajectory down a different track altogether.
All the fuss is because if the trojan corn somehow gets planted and grows, then that represents unlicensed used of the product and Zimbabwe's corn can't be sold because the crop was "stolen" from Monsanto or Ortho or whoever's GM seeds it came from.
Even if the corn manufacturer didn't come after them for theft, Zimbabwe still wouldn't be able to sell ANY of their corn to countries that don't accept GMO food becuase they're very picky about tiny amounts of contamination. It's kinda like to be "organic" fruit or the fields have to have been free of pesticides for thee years -- only then do they say it's organic. Before that it's transitional.
Now, I have strong feelings about GMO foods. It's one thing to cross this rose with this rose and make a new rose. It's something else when you splice a gene from a salmon into a strawberry. Maybe it's no different from a functional biology perspective but to me, selective breeding is very different than molecular level manipulation of DNA.
The other thing is: how do we know this stuff is safe? Who tests it? What is so wrong with non-GMO food that it's reached the end of its useful lifespan and needs to be "overclocked" to provide any value?
And this whole concept of the "terminator" seed, one that only grows once, and the seed it produces is sterile. I don't think I'm being alarmist whey I say I'm very concerned about those kinds of seeds being introduced in the wild. Who is to say it wouldn't cross-breed with "normal" plants and keep them from reproducing? Don't many of the variations in life around us stem from mutations or genetic mishaps of one form or another?
If you want me to believe that GMO food is just fine, then I need to see empirical data. Show me leukemia rates for children who eat "normal" crops and ones who eat GMO. No such studies exist, to my knowledge. I'm not going to just take the word of the salesman that the product is safe, and the USDA shouldn't either.
I was talking about those cool clocks they have in the town square where little mechanical gnomes pop out and pee on the audience or whatever.
That and the wooden shoes.
Dude, the serial numbers. Creepy. WHen I was a kid, there was this old couple up the street and I don't exaclty know why, but one day I was in their house and I saw the digits on her forearm. It was pretty amazing, even as a kid I sorta knew what that meant. It is a memory that has stuck with me ever since.
Poor EU. I get the feeling that they are trying so hard to copy America's economic model for success that they might just lose sight of what it is that makes Europe a good place to live in the first place.
"Look, America has a strong currency, we need one too, or we can't be competitive"
"Hey, America has a DMCA, we must need one too."
"Snakeoil" is one of the default settings in Openssl when you make certificates for yourself. They tell you to change it to whatever town you're in...if you read the directions...
So... we don't read the articles, and Slashdot admins don't read the directions.
HARD TO BELIEVE!
According to the article, so far there's only a 4.7% increase between the 4x and 8x cards.
That article would have been about a million times more useful if they had bothered to show performance of an AGP 2x system. From what I can see, there is no compelling performance increase (5% better doesn't compel me to buy a new mobo) with this new standard.
Anyone have an idea as to how AGP 4x compared to 2x when it first came out, and how it stacks up now that the technology is mature?
Actually I just got a new AGP4x video card, and I've been thinking about dropping it in my old Dell workstation with 2x AGP to see how it does, but of course that computer has a PII-350 and my new one has an Athlon XP 1600+ so it wouldn't really be too useful a comparison...
Yeah, those Radeon drivers are weird, huh? I just got my 8500 and man, those betas from guru3d or whatever will screw with your system. I got the BSoD once, but several time the system actually just froze, which is pretty impressive, and shows how Microsoft has incoroporated some of Linux's features into their product line
I've often gone into "The Zone" when programming.
Here's how the network administrator gets into the zone:
I visit windowsupdate and download all the latest security patches, and then, I read the mega-combined EULA which is actually twenty separate EULAs in one, in that tiny text box that only shows like 200 words at a time.
My boss thought I was on drugs when I started doing that. Although she might be right; windowsupdate is kind of like an addiction. I keep going back for more, just checking to see if there's any new "good stuff" there.
The fact that he showed it to a newspaper reporter indicates there was *no* goodwill involved.
So, we should do it the Microsoft way? Tell the company about a flaw in their system and let them spend months to fix it, leaving countless unaware individuals completely vulnerable while the "proper authorities" formulate a cost-benefit analysis and figure out where the bug fix lives on the Gantt chart?
Why do you think we *have* news?? You would prefer to get all your news from press releases and government propaganda, it seems.
First of all, the county's IT department was negligent, possibly to the point of criminality, in providing WiFi access to the LAN without any security measures. Would Puffer be looking at five years of jail time if he plugged his laptop into a jack in the hall and found he had LAN access? Maybe. But isn't the County office, by definition, public property? He wasn't tresspassing.
It's like if the government was sending secret information unencrypted on 95.5 FM. You tuned in, told a govt agent and a reporter about it, and now you're the one who did something wrong? This makes sense to anyone here?
The person who really made out in this gig is the "Security Consultant" who charged $5,000 to "solve" this problem. Setting up a VPN for your WiFi clients takes what, about 20 minutes? But clearly the County was so alarmed about the Terrorist Hackers out there that they decided they needed a big expensive solutions. These are serious problems, you know, and they will probably get some of that Anti-Terrorism money from the Feds to pay for Hardening their System against FutureTerrorist Attacks.
By the way, I deal with confidential medical data as part of my job. There's this law called HIPAA. If I were to set up an open WiFi access point on my LAN, *I* could be jailed and fined up to $25,000. *NOT* the guy who is nice enough to tell us (but kind of a dick for telling the local paper.)
What's next? Are we gonna go after Richard Feynman for pointing out that frozen O-Rings make the Shuttle blow up? Mabye I should get hauled off for mentioning that you can punch through the hull of a pressurized aircraft while it's in flight with a big enough screwdriver!
Don't worry about me, though. When I get hauled off into the black Fed car, I'll just yell "Hack the Planet" to the kids on the street and next thing you know, the Slashdot Activist Justice League will rally to my defense!
Let's see, on the front page we have two stories. One is entitled "MPAA Requests Immunity to Commit Cyber-Crimes" and it's all about those evil Hollywood companies and how they're going to DoS you because you have a few MP3s on your box.
Then, there's this story about how kewl all this new Anime is and how awesome it will be if Hollywood can bring more Anime to American consumers.
You all are a bunch of f@#$ing morons. You can't even tell when your culture is being co-opted by THE SAME PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO SCREW YOU. You're even freaking happy about it, like it will become BETTER when it goes mainstream? What? You think this world will be a better place if Hollywood owns the rights to all your precious kewl anime!?
I simply can't believe the rampant, ignorant hypocrisy of this forum. It's like it's nothing but a bunch of 1337 5cr1p7 k1dd135 talking shit about "anarchy" and "f@#$ the man" while they're pumping every last dollar into the latest shiny entertainment trinket the local Best Buy has to offer.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but Windows File Protection can be overriden in the registry, and the whole concept is to prevent people, by which I mean users, from trying to see the Secret Message from Bill Gates that only shows up if you del *.dll in C:\Windows.
Why is notepad a protected file? Hell, why is calc.exe a protected file? That's what I'd like to know.